Deep and Wide

One day this week I had arranged to meet a friend for lunch, and as I went to meet her it was one of those moments when it was not yet clear how the day was going to go. You know how it is: some days it feels like I am fighting some invisible monster, who flicks stains on my new shirt, directs fellow drivers to cut me off in traffic, knocks out the servers of the websites I want to visit and eats holes in the socks I planned to wear. Other days, though the monster is sleeping, and I glide effortlessly along, receiving the benefit of green lights, unexpected discounts, and resources that seem to fall from the sky. What was this day going to be like? I thought I saw a great parking spot, but was beaten to it by a swifter driver. As I tried to go back around the aisle to get to the other side of the lot, a big delivery truck blocked my lane and I suddenly found myself forced out of the parking lot and onto a side street. There was a spot there, though it was metered parking and I wasn’t sure all the change I scraped up was quite going to be enough to keep me from the dreaded red “Violation” flag which my town enforces with some vigor. As I walked toward the meeting spot my friend and I had designated, I saw some seminary classmates walking into another restaurant. We waved, and they hesitated, which I interpreted as, “Hey, come say hello.” But when I got over to them, I decided I might have misinterpreted the message. They seemed distracted, or maybe just dazed from their Greek quiz, and so I went back across the parking lot feeling a little foolish, hearing the opening bars of my endlessly looping inner narrative about what a dork I am.

As I stood there, a woman walked past me to get into her car, and as she passed, she asked, “Everything okay?”

“Oh, sure,” I replied, sort of waving her off with a flap of my arm. “Just meeting someone.” I wondered what she had seen in my face, a little downcast, or in my posture, where I noticed, I was standing hugging my elbows to ward off the jabs of the monster.

I called after the woman. “It was really very kind of you to ask,” I said, and she stopped at her car door. She smiled at me. “I normally don’t do things like that,” she said.  We regarded each other.  There were more than a few things, at least on the surface, separating us: age, race, maybe social class (her shoes were so much nicer than mine.) But just for an instant those things seemed outside what we were sharing.  “Well, thanks for taking the time,” I said. “If more people were willing. . .” and she nodded, filling in the rest of my thought with her unspoken agreement.

Just then my friend showed up and we had lunch, a very pleasant conversation that ranged from writers we had admired to the problem of friends who send us unwanted emails about politics we don’t share. Somehow in the course of the conversation, I used the word “lackadaisical,” and a member of the wait staff, gliding by, exclaimed, “That’s my favorite word! I love you!” A very fine word, indeed, I agreed. Tragically underused. Seems like the universe does like me today, I thought. She really likes me!

The woman at the parking lot had changed the trajectory of my whole day, because she had been able to step outside her day, her errands, and see me as someone who needed a little kindness or compassion or just a bit of attention. I can only guess that she saw something in me despite our differences that made her able to feel she might have been in my shoes. Maybe she’s an unusually intuitive person, maybe she is a social worker or a minister, maybe she’s a brilliant businessperson who quickly sizes up situations. I have no way of knowing. But her ability to see me as someone she could relate to reminded me of something Joseph Campbell wrote, about how the basis for all great religions is simple compassion, which comes from seeing ourselves in the other.

Campbell also wrote this. “The experience of mystery does not come from expecting it, but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes.” (From Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.)

I sometimes describe myself as a person seeking the mystery, searching the big answers. But maybe Campbell is right to suggest that the real experience we are seeking is not found so much in our striving, isn’t “found” at all, but realized in those moments when we fall out of the vessels of our expectations and into something bigger.

And then, as if I might have missed the point, as I walked back to my parking spot, I managed to intercept the meter reader and successfully plead for a chance to drive away before the ticket had appeared.

Photo credit: ©Gerry Thomasen